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Kevin Seeger's Profile
Customer Reviews: 27
New Reviewer Rank: 67,212
Classic Reviewer Rank: 26,125
Helpful Votes:
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Reviews Written by
Kevin Seeger "DudeSeeg" (Woodland Hills, CA United States)
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Simply Suspects
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| Offered by Fat Brain Toys |
| Price: $20.25 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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Vapid Take on a Fascinating Subject, November 20, 2008
What could be more interesting than a look at medieval outcasts in a time of conform or get roasted on a spit? The subject deserves a better telling than this collection of run-on sentences. The text is cobbled together from contemporary accounts of crime and punishment lifted from the annals of history. The chapters are laid out as if there is meant to be some coherency to the subject matter. There is a bit but not much as the subject of heretics, for example, can jump from treatment in the year 850 to 1450 with little regard to the subtleties of cultural change during the interim period. It's as if the book was written by a scholar who forgot to take his Ritalin. The information is so poorly organized that it is hardly memorable. I came away with a few nuggets but I wouldn't recommend the book.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Informative and Fun, May 2, 2005
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. There is not much more to say about poker that hasn't been covered already. Gordon doesn't spend his time going into grueling details on strategy. Rather, he gives some insight on the whole poker phenomenon and especially, what it is like to be a travelling poker professional. The book is written in a wonderful style that is both informative and hilarious. Nuggets abound that will elicit laughter from the reader, such as the priceless: Every (online poker) site seems to have built-in language filters to block obscenities, but you can get creative with spacing when you need to call someone an a s s h o l e.
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Human Zoo
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by Desmond Morris
Edition: Paperback |
| Availability: Out of Print--Limited Availability |
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The Adventure Continues, November 29, 2004
The advent of farming ushered into society a food surplus which brought intertribal trade, which begat towns and the urbanization of the super-tribe, and for the first time each individual no longer knew personally each member of his community. Shifting from a personal to an impersonal society has caused the human animal its greatest agonies for the past several thousand years. As a species we are not biologically equipped to cope with a mass of strangers masquerading as members of our tribe. As a result of the artificiality of the inflation of human social life to the super-tribe level, it became necessary to introduce more elaborate forms of controls to hold the bulging communities together.
And this book is the study of our natural biological tendencies butting up against our unnatural social controls. It is a thoroughly fascinating look at our species as it struggles to adapt to the urban sprawl of the modern age. We are an incredibly adaptive animal, but there is no question we are experiencing growing pains as we adapt to an environment for which our genetic evolution has not prepared us.
If you have read and enjoyed THE NAKED APE as every person should, then pick up HUMAN ZOO and also INTIMATE BEHAVIOR to complete the five-star Desmond Morris trilogy on human behavior.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
The Voice of Project Blue Book, November 29, 2004
Edward Ruppelt spent years at the helm of Project Blue Book in the days when the Air Force was seriously trying to figure out what was going on, rather than acting solely as an instrument to debunk genuine sightings and placate a confused populace. This book is a great history of the late forties, early fifties so far as the "Martian threat" is concerned.
Ruppelt put together a team of investigators who put serious time and effort into interviewing witnesses and cataloging data. They tried several proactive initiatives to capture verifiable evidence of UFO activity, such as sending up jets loaded with film in the gun cameras, but could never come away with quite enough evidence to convince the top Pentagon brass of the UFO's unearthly nature.
Not that Ruppelt couldn't supply plenty of evidence. Most everyone who looked at what he had compiled became convinced of the interplanetary explanation. The problem wasn't the availability of proof; the problem was in determining how much proof constitutes absolute proof. There never was the smoking gun which would convince the brass to accept the interplanetary explanation as the definitive explanation. So long as the UFO's could possibly be harmless natural light and/or weather phenomena, then there was no reason to take a definitive position.
Ruppelt has a great point of view. He remained stalwart in gathering evidence and trying every possible way to explain each UFO sighting as an explainable occurrence. He had about an 80% success rate. Most sightings indeed were weather balloons, nonconventional aircraft, Venus, temperature inversions, or seagulls. These explanations were given plenty of press. The 20% unknowns were simply unknowns with no further comment given.
This historical document of an interesting era in military and social history takes on added depth with the 1979 bombshell of our supposed recovery of a downed craft in Roswell in the summer of 1947. As you read of Ruppelt repeatedly facing resistance to the extraterrestrial option from the Pentagon, you can question whether the directive was coming down from the top to put the kabosh on the ET explanation until "more proof is made available" while the top brass is sitting on the ultimate proof all along, with Ruppelt none the wiser.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Unearthly Disclosures, October 7, 2004
I read Tim Good's ABOVE TOP SECRET and was duly impressed with his journalism. Good proved straightforward and well-researched. I was surprised by the sensationalism in ALIEN CONTACT. This is not a bad book, just a vastly different one than his hallmark tome.
Good touches upon cattle mutilations, subterranean alien bases, and many of the ancillary connections to the UFO phenomenon. The best portion of the book is an in-depth look at Bob Lazar and his supposed inside information. Lazar claims to have been briefly employed at the Nevada site known as Area 51.
Lazar subsequently had a falling out with his employers and began divulging confidential information to prevent the feds from whacking him before he could violate security. His strategy was to come out with the information so that he would be immune to elimination, as a mysterious death would serve to prove him correct posthumously. Instead, he would put up with the inevitable ridicule and harassment. Judge for yourself whether you believe his information. I will tell you that I was impressed. He sounds like he understands the technology and what he says fits in nicely with all the known information that has leaked from the elite military junta over the years.
The book is a worthy read, though not as an all-purpose overview of the UFO and related phenomena. I also read Good's 2000 book UNEARTHLY DISCLOSURE, which also was highly enjoyable. In this work, Good goes very much in depth on a few otherworldly experiences reported by various earthlings. The chapters and pictures detailing Filiberto Caponi's saga are really great. Do a web search on Caponi to get his story - it really is good stuff. Without the story, the pictures look pretty fake. But add in the story and also Caponi's wonderful sketches, and it begins to sound too strange to be made up. It may be that he has captured photographs of something extraterrestrial.
There are scores of stories from around the world detailing encounters with strange creatures. These are not just delusions - there has often been physical evidence such as hair or blood left at the scene which has been analyzed and found not to match any known creature. One epicenter of strange creature sightings is Puerto Rico, where Good has professed his belief in the existance of a subterranean alien base.
It all gets to sound so crazy, but most of the leading researchers over the past decade have come to believe in alien bases and aliens among us. Either that is what is really going on or the governments of the globe have done a great job of infusing disinformation into ufology circles. With tourists going into space with digital cameras, the day can't be far off when the proof of an alien presence in, on, and around Earth is undeniable. Whatever else we discover and how this knowledge alters our civilization going forward and looking back will be monumental.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Hilarious, September 28, 2004
The best comedy is rooted in truth. Nick Cassanova takes the basic "confidant male" strategy for picking up the ladies, and embellishes it to the nth degree, resulting in a laugh-out loud "manual" for scoring with the chicks. This is a very light read, but is quite enjoyable. The author plays it straight while offering uproarious methods to co-opt one's way into a stranger's (...)
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
The Expert Has Spoken and Has Left Me Wanting, September 22, 2004
I had viewed a DVD entitled ULTIMATE CROP CIRCLES: SIGNS FROM SPACE? and very much enjoyed listening to leading researcher, Colin Andrews, discuss his findings. His is a very scientific approach to the mystery, which attempts to, but ultimately falls short of explaining what exactly is causing the worldwide crop circle phenomenon.
There are several theories - the best one allows for some sort of as yet undiscovered electromagnetic effect interfering with the natural magnetic fields of our planet, creating plasma vortexes in much the same way as tornados and hurricanes are conjured by wind vortexes. Andrews explores all the theories in this book, from UFO landings to poltergeist activity, with varying degrees of satisfaction. It is interesting to note that the great majority of circles appear within a forty mile radius of Stonehenge, which itself resembles the sedimentation of an ancient crop circle design.
All in all, after coming away very impressed from his lecture, I was immensely disappointed by this book. The organization of the book is very poor. The chapters bounce around from this topic to that in vignette form, often changing authors without a proper introduction, leaving me more than once wondering who was at the helm. Andrews spends an inordinate amount of time reporting on his spiritual growth since he took up the mystery. This is all very fascinating, and is no doubt part and parcel of the phenomenon, but without definitive conclusions on the mystery's cause, the ancillary anecdotal effects are just so much noise lost in the signal.
Although I have no doubt that some mysterious forces is responsible for most of the simple circles, Andrews left me with the impression that all of the more elaborate designs which have appeared in the past two decades are the product of pranksters, debunkers, and government operatives. Andrews goes so far as to say that the hoaxers are inextricably linked with the phenomenon, as if the mysterious forces are compelling them to create designs in cereal fields.
Andrews would do himself a great favor by codifying these arguments and focusing on data and not conjecture. I still respect him as the ultimate go to guy for the crop circle phenomenon, but I rather wish he had authored the definitive book on the subject rather than this random collection of postulates.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Good Compendium of Official Secrecy, September 20, 2004
Timothy Good's 1988 ABOVE TOP SECRET is not a quick easy read, but it offers an unmatched pile of information for the skeptic. Nearly every researcher who has studied the UFO phenomenon has concluded that they are space craft operated by extraterrestrial biological entities, and Good is no exception.
Good takes a special interest in what governments other than the USA are doing about the problem. He catalogues several instances where a government's rheteric is in conflict with its actions. There is an especially good and lengthy appendix with document after document from the world's governments, proving that despite their denials, they do take UFO sightings seriously.
As a British investigator, Good details the intelligence services of the UK, and how they liason with those of America and also the KGB. Some of the best information lies in the exposure of secret government organizations and how they liason with ech other. You can almost create an org chart to follow the flow of information from the moment a witness makes his frantic phone call to the local authorities.
Some of the individual sighting reports can safely be skipped, but as you get deeper into the report, you begin getting to the real meat of what makes this book valuable. Knock off a star for overlong and somewhat dry, and you are left with a four-star must read for the UFO buff.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Good Overview of Ufology, September 1, 2004
This book offers a compendium of theses which decently portrays the UFO and alien abduction phenomena.
1) UFOLOGY AND ACADEMIA: THE UFO PHENOMENON AS A SCHOLARLY DISCIPLINE argues for the inclusion of the UFO mystery into the mainstream academia, which should be studying such things, but instead chooses to distance itself from the phenomenon. The debate has been relegated to the tabloid fringe, and respectable science won't go near it. This will need to change if we are ever to get to the bottom of it all.
2) LIMITED ACCESS: SIX NATURAL SCIENTISTS AND THE UFO PHENOMENON is a good primer on six important early ufologists, who laid the groundwork of how to study the phenomenon while government maintained its official position of denial. Some of these men worked for the government as public debunkers, while privately realizing that there is definitely something going on which offers no easy explanations.
3) SCIENCE, LAW, AND WAR: ALTERNATIVE FRAMEWORKS FOR THE UFO EVIDENCE debates which segment of society is most adept at studying the UFO phenomenon. Ultimately, science cannot move forward without tangible proof, which has proven elusive. Science requires data, not eyewitness testimony. The military offers the preferred framework from which to attack the mystery. After all, the objects appear in our skies, seemingly oblivious to our need for an explanation for them. The military must determine if there is a direct or indirect threat to the people it has enlisted to protect, while cloistering itself from public scrutiny.
4) UFO'S, THE MILITARY, AND THE EARLY COLD WAR ERA is a fantastic history of the public and militaristic mindsets of our country beginning with the mystery of the WWII foo fighters and into the Project Blue Book era. It is not surprising that the mysterious objects were first considered to be of Nazi design, and later, of Soviet design using captured Nazi technology. The concept that they were possibly of extraterrestrial origin came later. If the Soviets were showcasing high technology as psychological warfare, then the proper US response was to offer explanations that the objects were either hitherto unknown natural phenomena, or simply weren't there at all. Sounds familiar.
5) THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL HYPOTHESIS IN THE EARLY UFO AGE tells that when Gallup took a poll shortly after the war to gauge the public's opinion on the "flying saucer" phenomenon, it was discovered that most Americans considered only three options for the objects: Soviet design, American design, or hoax. The saucers as machinery of extraterrestrial origin was not even considered. Our government could exclude the American design option, and was left with Soviet or ET design. If they were of Soviet design, then we were facing an empire which was so technologically advanced that it is surprising they didn't whoop us.
6) UFO'S: LOST IN THE MYTHS offers evidence throughout the history of mankind for some sort of archetypical relationship between men and creatures of the spirit world. Whether speaking of gods, angels, devils, incubi, witches, or fairies, men of history have described entities outside of our reality which nonetheless are capable of interfering with our business. Are the Grays the latest manifestation?
7) THE UFO ABDUCTION CONTROVERSY IN THE UNITED STATES is written by David Jacobs. For decades, UFO's were strictly an eyewitness phenomenon. All the data was based on sightings and occasional landing traces, but any accounts of entities were dismissed outright. This changed in the mid-60's when the first accounts of abduction went public. Ufology was split, as the sightings experts distanced themselves from this new implausibility. Jacobs is convinced that the abductions are the main reason that the UFO's are in our skies. The reason for the abductions involves the use of human reproductive facilities to create transgenic beings of alien design. It sounds silly, but there is plenty of data to back up this claim.
8) HYPNOSIS AND THE INVESTIGATION OF UFO ABDUCTION ACCOUNTS is Budd Hopkins' refutation of the main knock against his investigative technique: the tendency toward confabulation between the interviewer and the subject during hypnosis. Everything Hopkins writes is genius and this is no exception.
9) HOW THE ALIEN ABDUCTION PHENOMENON CHALLENGES THE BOUNDARIES OF OUR REALITY is John Mack putting his Harvard brain to good use by intellectualizing the abduction phenomenon much more than the pragmatists Hopkins and Jacobs. Mack senses that we should not be trying to force the "aliens" into our preconceived notion of reality, but should recognize the existence of the aliens as proof that our notion of reality is incomplete.
10) THE UFO EXPERIENCE: A NORMAL CORRELATE OF HUMAN BRAIN FUNCTION presents medical data showing how easy it is to reproduce the "entity perception" by electrically stimulating certain areas of the brain. Electrical interference patterns can be "programmed" and sent through the skull, directly into the brain, which can dissociate the two lobes of the brain to a degree that the person will actually project into reality a second self. Side effects of this brain stimulation include the sensation of floating and odd smells, amongst other things that are par for the course in abduction reports.
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(Woodland Hills, CA United States)
